Drug Medical Information

OVEREATERS ANONYMOUS: THE ATHEIST WHO MADE A ZIF

A compulsive overeater, they say, is a sort of guilt detector. If there's any guilt around, you pick it up, take it home, nurture it, feed it, love it.

I felt guilty as a kid because I used to have nightmares all the time. They were always the same. Some devil or monster was chasing me and I'd wake up screaming. This happened when I was about ten years old. In that same year, I figured out a way to get rid of these dreams. I became an atheist. Since there was no God, he wasn't going to send devils or monsters after me.

I stopped having the nightmares. I would say, "Go ahead, throw a lightning bolt at me. I know you're not there. It's all those weak people who need to believe in God. Me, I'm strong. I don't need you."

What I did need was to eat and eat. At thirteen, when all the other boys were starting to go out with girls, I weighed 200 pounds. My parents took me to a doctor who gave me thyroid, which was what they used before speed was invented. When I was twenty, they found another doctor. This one put me on a "modified fast" diet. I ate nothing for two weeks at a time. This had a profound effect on me because I soon discovered that breaking such a long fast made me vomit. My stomach couldn't tolerate the food. But if I stopped every five or ten minutes on the way home, I could eat for seventy-two hours straight. That really sharpened my ability to binge.

In spite of the binging, however, I lost about 82 pounds that summer. I was down to a trim 217. It was the first time in my life that I could walk into a real people's store instead of a fat men's store where you pay twice as much for styles that went out thirty years ago. The suit I bought was olive green. I felt so good when I tried it on and it fit. It was the biggest size they had in the store, but it was a "regular" store and the suit fit.

I went back to school and decided it was time to start going out. I had never been on a date in my life. I took one girl out and the highlight of the evening was when she got out of the car. I thought, "Thank God, that's over with." I had been very uncomfortable. I didn't know what to do or say. I forced myself to try it again and it was the same: the best part of the evening was when the girl left.

At that time I was living with three roommates. One of them introduced me to a friend of a friend, a girl who was also "people." She used to come over and we'd talk. I started going out with her. We went together for about two months and finally, at twenty-one, I had sex for the first time. We got married in June. I weighed

297 pounds. I hadn't had a chance to wear that olive green suit a half dozen times before it didn't fit any more. I certainly didn't wear it at my wedding; it wouldn't have fit on one leg.

We moved to California and my life took on some really excising aspects. I would have a giant breakfast, then go to work. At about 9:30 the coffee shop downstairs would send up "refreshments" for the coffee break. I always had a couple. First, though, I'd sneak downstairs and have a few early ones, and after the coffee break I'd go back down and finish off what was left. Around noon, the catering truck came and I'd have a big lunch, then eat some more at the afternoon coffee break. And always, on the way home from work, I had to stop for something to eat. In the evening, after a big dinner, I would lie on the couch and watch television while my wife fed me sugar. Each night I faded into a stupor and then got up the next morning and started again.

That was the way I maintained 325 pounds. One day I walked into a drugstore and noticed a little diet book. I bought it and counted my calories for about nine months. I lost 120 pounds. Now came the ego. You see, I had always thought I was great, even when my self-worth was nonexistent. I could never admit that I was wrong. I made up "facts" to win an argument. Now, having lost that weight, I knew I was great. For one thing, when I was fat it was clear to me that I was crazy: one look told me that. But when I lost the weight, I thought I was sane because I believed it was the fat that had been making me crazy.

There's nothing more dangerous than a crazy person who thinks he's sane. I got divorced. Then I went on a spree to try to make up for all the fun I had missed. I was "going steady" with three women at the same time once, and my roommate had a list of who to tell what when they called.

I have a theory that if a person has a fat head and a thin body, one has to catch up with the other. I maintained my weight for a while with "sensible" eating techniques such as nothing but carrots for a week. Or all the celery you can eat with nothing in between. For binging between fasts, laxatives were my bag. The only problem was they didn't work; I ate again as soon as I had that nice empty feeling.

Slowly, the weight started to creep up. During this second thin period, I had taken up sports. I was the fellow whose worst subject in school was gym. I would wash the coach's car, clean his desk, do anything I had to do to get out of gym. I couldn't do a single sit-up or pushup; I couldn't run thirty feet. My body was a total handicap. Now, when I lost all that weight and started surfing and playing volleyball and water skiing, it was as if I had been a quadriplegic all my life and suddenly I had full use of my limbs. My body was functioning. My body could bring me joy. It was a wonderful feeling.

But I started to gain the weight back. First slowly, then faster. I was losing my body again. There wasn't a water ski big enough to float me anymore; and snow skiing, I looked like an avalanche rolling down the hill. Nobody would play volleyball with me. I had an eleven-foot surfboard and I couldn't get out of the water on it. I had one girlfriend left and the relationship was very tenuous. At work, where I held a technical sales position, my bosses were telling me that I was not a fit representative for the company.

One night, I lay on my bed with a pain in my chest. I knew what it was. The doctors had all promised me a heart attack by the time I was thirty. All my life I knew that was what I was going to get for my birthday unless I lost weight. In the morning, I walked across the street to the emergency room of the hospital and checked myself in. They ran an EKG, and when the orderly came out later I asked, "What is it?" He told me it was "pudgy pain."

I was an atheist; I couldn't make a solemn oath to God, but I made one to myself. This was it. I had dieted before and I was going to do it again. It was the shortest diet I was ever on. It lasted four lanes. I walked back across the street and ate sugar for about four hours. Then I went on a diet and lost 35 pounds in eight weeks, and after that I went on another diet and lost 25 pounds in six weeks. I always gained back that weight with a little bonus - five or ten pounds for trying.

The night I hit bottom is very clear in my memory. My roommate was home. This guy was the greatest ladies' man in all of Southern California. He would go out to a bar or someplace and come home with a beautiful woman every night. That night he had come in with a girl and I could hear them talking upstairs. I was sitting on my bed with my package of goodies next to me, eating and crying. I thought, "There's no sense trying to quit eating because I can't. For some reason I'm different from other people. The only choice I have is to just enjoy my food. I'm going to lose my job, and I'm going to die, but hopefully when I go it'll be fast; I won't have to be an invalid."

I had never heard of the twelve steps and I knew nothing about Alcoholics Anonymous, but that night I took step one. I admitted that I was powerless over food and my life was unmanageable, right at gut level. And I also took step three, in a way. I made a decision right then and there to turn my will and my life over to my higher power, which was food. But it was a good start. It set the stage.

At this time, I was being treated by my doctor for dysentery. That good man had been delighted to see me lose weight and now he was horrified that I was gaining it all back. The dysentery I was suffering was so severe I would almost pass out. Yet I gained 14 pounds in one month. We didn't know what caused the dysentery until after I got into Overeaters Anonymous. It was from pouring sugar into myself at such a rate that my system wouldn't tolerate it.

On one visit, the doctor ran an EKG and a heart vector. He told me things were not good. "You can't afford to gain any more weight," he said. "You have to lose it or you're going to die."

"I know that," I said, "but don't bother to give me a diet because it's a waste of your paper."

"When you go outside," he said, "I want you to ask my secretary for the OA phone number. I have a patient who is a member and she said to have people like you call her."

A woman answered the phone. "I want you to tell me all there is to know about this Overeaters Anonymous," I told her.

"I can't do that," she said. "It's too complicated to explain."

I really believe that God put this woman there because if she had tried to tell me what Overeaters Anonymous was about, I would have said, "Phtt," and gone out and died. Instead, I went to a meeting. I sat in the back row behind a post. Two large women sat down on either side of me. I couldn't get out.

When the meeting started, the first thing I heard was "God." I thought, Hah! Now I know. The next thing, they're going to want to convert me and they're going to bless me and dip me in water. I see what the gimmick is now.

When they called the coffee break, I saw my chance. I got up and started to leave. But people flocked around me and started talking to me. It seemed I was the only newcomer there. Before I could escape, the meeting started again. The speaker started off by saying, "I used to be 325 pounds and I'm now 180 pounds and my goal is to be half the man I once was."

I thought, "Uh-huh." Then he passed his picture around and it didn't look as though it was touched up. It was a real snapshot. I didn't hear anything else that night, but after the meeting I had to talk to that man. I had to know the secret. I had to make sure he was real. He invited me to go to coffee with the group.

"No, I can't," I said. "I'm busy. Winchell's will close in three hours."

But they kept asking me and it appeared obvious that they really wanted me. No one had wanted me for anything in so long that I went.

At home, I began thinking: The speaker was thin and she used to be fat, too. Maybe I'd better get a sponsor. I realized that I had only one telephone number: the woman I had first talked with. When I called and asked her to be my sponsor, she said, "I'd love to."

I called her every day for five months and I got to love that lady. She was about sixty-two years old and six-foot, three-inches tall, and she talked like a truck-driver. I didn't try to con her, ever. She said, "Do it," and I did it.

My Higher Power began evolving the day I heard someone suggest that nonbelievers make "a zif." I was an atheist; not an agnostic. An agnostic has doubts. I had never doubted anything. I knew there was no God. When I learned that "a zif" meant "acting as if," I was told that I didn't have to believe in anything. All I had to do was say, "God, I don't believe you're there, but anyway, I'd like such and such."

"You're asking me to be a hypocrite," I said: "Oh, heaven forbid! You could be a glutton, a thief and an egomaniac - vicious in every possible way; you could smell bad, you could look bad, but by God, we don't want you to be a hypocrite!" I said, "OK, I'll try it."

At first my Higher Power looked like my sponsor. Then he looked like me. Then, like a kind old man with a big beard. My Higher Power has always been a loving Higher Power. My sponsor told me, "You can choose anything you want, but it's got to be benevolent, not malevolent." So I started to develop a Higher Power that was sort of a spirit of the universe, and if I was in touch with that flow then I would go the easy way and good things would happen. And they did. Things just happened, one right after another. Beautiful things.

One morning I was eating breakfast and reading my twenty-four hour book when there was an earthquake. The house was rocking back and forth, and I felt a great rush of warmth several times. It was as if God was in me. He was rocking me back and forth in His arms and I was smiling. Nobody smiles during an earthquake. I sat there at the table and I picked up the twenty-four hour book and opened it and it said, "Fear not fire or earthquake." A cold chill shot through me and I went upstairs and took a shower with one eye open, thinking, "God, please don't be standing there when I get out of this shower because I'll die. You're not supposed to be there."

It got so I was praying for parking places and getting them.

About nine months ago, I was standing in my kitchen and I felt the warm flash again. I'm happy to say it's back. I have a good conscious contact with my Higher Power. We talk to each other. He knows I'm a screw-up, that I do things wrong. But He doesn't mind. He loves me pure and true, as only a perfect being can love. I can't love you that way, and you can't love me that way because we're not perfect. Only He can love us that way.

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